


'Til the Song Disappears

by hauntedlittledoll



Series: Tumblr Fic War [16]
Category: Batgirl (Comics), Batman (Comics), DCU (Comics), Marvel (Comics), The Incredible Hulk (Comics)
Genre: Aphasia, Brain Damage, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-07
Updated: 2014-08-07
Packaged: 2018-02-12 03:47:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2094492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hauntedlittledoll/pseuds/hauntedlittledoll
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for the anonymous prompt - "Cass has some kind of head injury which causes her to lose her hard-won abilities to read and to speak."</p>
            </blockquote>





	'Til the Song Disappears

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the song "Shatter Me" by Lindsey Stirling feat. Lzzy Hale.
> 
> The epigraph is taken from Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden. Characters and plot points are mentioned.
> 
> The song "We Will Rock You" by _Queen_ is also mentioned, and Dr. Leonard Samson has been borrowed from _Marvel Comics_.

* * *

_“At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done. Then they begin to hope it can be done._ _Then they see it can be done._

_Then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.”_

\- Frances Hodgeson Burnette; The Secret Garden

* * *

Tim is the first person she sees when she wakes up.  He’s asleep, delicately balanced in an uncomfortable position somewhere between the chair and the side of the hospital bed.

She lets him sleep.  Tim could always use the rest, and she watches him in quiet bemusement.

Tim had laced their fingers together.  She leaves them that way.

And when he starts to stir almost twenty minutes later, she is still awake.  She is still watching him, and she squeezes his hand when he starts to make the usual disgruntled grumbling noises.

He squeezes back almost absently.  Then his higher brain functions kick on, and Tim’s eyes pop open.  He falls to the floor with a yelp.

She bites back a giggle as she peers over the edge of the bed.

He’s trying to be offended, but he’s _—relieved—happy—thankful—loveyou—loveyou—Cassie—_ not succeeding.

She laughs out loud.

He ducks his head, muttering to himself.  It’s too low to make out, and she isn’t trying very hard.  She scoots over, and Tim crawls back onto the bed beside her.

She curls around him and rests her head over his heart.  Then she whispers three little words:

"Duck dances tea-time."

* * *

It’s gone.  All her hard work is gone.  The voices of her friends and family are an indistinct and unstoppable wave.  The letters that she worked so hard for mean nothing.

She breaks a lot of training simulations as she recovers from weeks of inactivity.

She can’t read her wall calendar anymore, but she can see all the pages that have been skipped.

Later, she will understand _—four—four pages—_ and she will know that she was unconscious for fifteen weeks and two days.  Later is a very long time from now.

She trains until her body moves exactly the way it should.  She trains until her punches are as strong as before and the high kicks no longer unbalance her.  She is a Bat, and Bats are too hard-headed to let a mere **brain injury** keep them down.

Steph fights her.  In the beginning, Steph even beats her and she can read the hollowness of the victory in her best friend’s unhappy posture.

She can still do that.  She can still read people.  It’s not reliable for telegraphing movements anymore, but she can see the truth inside them.

Steph hates this, but the blonde never pulls a punch.  Steph slaps her down if she tries to use her friend as a punching bag, and Steph sits on the mats beside her when her limbs feel like jelly and the wrong words spill over.

There’s no sense in being polite when no one understands.  She doesn’t have to guard their feelings, and she doesn’t like to consider her own.

"Go home to place hot like fire.  You fired.  Mine.  **So** fired.  Burn all ransoms.”

_—hate this—hate you—loveyou—hate you—hate this—_

She says a lot of things she doesn’t mean, but this refrain she means a lot.

* * *

She throws the file at Bruce.  Her father doesn’t even try to block, and paper goes everywhere.  A picture of the telepath that had once rewired her brain floats to the dinner table and lands in a puddle of spilled gravy.

No one speaks for a very long moment.

She yells to fill the silence.  The words are not right, but she knows the idea is sound.

They only hear the nonsense words that make it out of her mouth.

_—fix me—Batman—father—Dick—big brother—Barbara—teach me—help me—tell me—tell me— **tell me** —what’s wrong with me—_

"Plane sea, Star!  Forgot the trunk.  No forgetting.  Stop!  Stop, swimming black again.  Again. Pull back.  Signal … signal … **signal** … Say bad luck, Duck.”

She points at the photograph angrily.  “Cut!”  She points at her head and the scar that disappeared into uneven hair.  “Tunnels.  Cut the tunnels.  Cut the puzzle.  Puzzle parts finalized.  **Snap!** ”

_—put them back—make it right again—this worked before—I can learn **again** —_

The others break out into the sea of meaningless babble.  They gesture uselessly, and use small words.  Some speak faster as if they can get through if they spit out enough words and some speak slower as if she could process one word at a time if she just tried hard enough.

Bruce is silent.

**"Troglodyte!"**

The words stop.  The hands still.

Alfred touches her shoulder as he reaches past her to rescue the photograph.  She tries to smile for the butler.  It’s flat.

Bruce takes the photograph and begins to reassemble the file.  He is talking now; his voice is calm and reassuring as he looks her in the eye.

She breaks his nose with the heel of her palm, and runs from the room.

Her father was looking at her, but he was talking to Dick.

* * *

She picks out the part of the landscape that doesn’t belong.  She sees the gun.

_—sniper—_

Tim looks up from the last of the hostages as she lays her hand on his shoulder.  She curls her hand under her chin with thumb and index finger resting on either side of her jaw.  She points.

Red Robin flies straight at the threat without hesitation, and she flies after him.

_—no—wrong—sniper—sniper—_

She thinks the mad screech is what allows her the time to tackle Tim out of the line of fire.  She thinks the sniper is new to Gotham, and possibly mistakes her wordless shrieking for the Black Canary’s cry.

She may not have a sonic scream, but she can make considerable noise all on her own.

Tim is startled too, his eyes going wide under the cowl lenses as she crouches over him and jabs at the golden bulls-eye on his chest.

_—stupid boy—_

* * *

In the beginning, she spends hours struggling through the scans and x-rays and test results.  The pictures don’t mean enough on their own.  She can’t interpret them, and she can’t understand the others when they try.

Mock-charades goes badly wrong, and soothing words can turn into screaming matches.

_—why—why not help me—why—_

She once thought _—no words—_ to be the biggest problem.  Now she has words, but they come out wrong.

The Cantonese that she had picked up from her time in Hong Kong suffers the same affliction as her English.  When she tries to draw for Barbara again, the simplified images they had previously established are mixed up like her words.  Details help a little, but …

… but she doesn’t have the time to draw a masterpiece for every thought in her head.

_—broken—_

Sign language is a brief, hopeful light.  She knows the standard hand-signals for patrol.  She can reproduce the alphabet when Dick teaches it to her.  Repetition is easy.  Putting the letters together is impossible.

Signs are symbols after all.

_—words off the page—speech without sound—_

Tim almost pays the price, and she stops trying to talk.

She knows something is wrong, but she doesn’t understand exactly what it is.  Bain injury is too broad, and gestures are too vague to narrow it down.

She thinks resentfully:

_—broken words—_

* * *

The strings of almost intelligible profanity make Tim cringe and Alfred stare.

Jason returns it word for word without taking offense.

Steph listens until Cass is finished, and it’s almost like a conversation that way.  They take turns talking, and neither understands the other, but they pretend just to keep themselves sane.

* * *

"It’s blue coin.  I jumped tall for going on empty.  I fall the leaves long time ago.  This night; we smoked this trophy."

_—not fair—want to talk—want them back—my words—I earned them—_

Steph strokes her uneven hair, and nods along.

"Hoops.  Hoops and hurdles hit the button.  Goose hurts for lost Duck.  I need chocolate."

Steph laughs and agrees even though her friend knows that isn’t what she’s trying to say.

_—worked so hard—now starting over—stupid therapist—do not need—not need at all—have you—_

Close enough.  She never turns down chocolate.

On the day that she shows up at her best friend’s window with scissors, Steph cuts her hair so that it’s even again.  It’s never been this short before, but she thinks she can live with it now.

She still turns down the offered pictures of a Mohawk.

 **"Chicken-shit!"** she laughs loudly as she slams the laptop lid closed.  “No, not a chicken.  Not a **bird** ,” she corrects herself, smiling fondly at her best friend.

* * *

Steph tricks Damian into letting them give him a faux-hawk instead.

* * *

Cass can sing “We Will Rock You” word for word, but the lyrics don’t mean anything to her. 

The excited light in Babs’ eyes fades, and she turns the radio off.

Cass listens to Christmas carols on the antique record player in the attic instead, and sings along to the ones that she knew.

It may be gibberish to her own ears, but the words are smooth and goodwill doesn’t have to be seasonal.

* * *

She hates the therapist.

It isn’t fair.  He’s a nice man with green hair, and he has solid connections to the Justice League and she knows that Dick likes him.

He helped Dick.  Maybe he could help her if she could talk to him.

But she can’t.

Battle lines are drawn.  Somewhat literally.

The therapist keeps giving her mazes to work on, but he’s drawn a thick black line across each page with a ruler.  Almost all of the puzzles are impossible to solve this way, and the piles of ruined maze worksheets make her angry.

She can do this if he just stops making it so hard.

She tears a sheaf of them in half on a bad day.  She rips right down the dark line of ink and throws both halves at the therapist.

_—you solve—_

He’s still for a long moment.  She can watch as he processes … she can actually pinpoint the moment a new idea hits him.  He grabs two halves from different mazes and tapes them back together, pointing at it with something gentler than excitement _—pride—hope—maybe—_

He gives her the disjointed maze, and she sinks back in her seat.  The offending line is gone, but the other lines don’t match up …

(one is round with curlicues depicting the possible paths; the other is square and repeats itself in geometric patterns)

… and it’s easy to extend her own pencil through a misaligned slot into the bottom half of the other maze.  From there, it only takes another minute or so to work her way out of the bottom half.

She shows it to her therapist triumphantly, and pays close attention as he gestures from the start of the maze to her and back to the bottom of the maze.  He repeats the gesture, and swipes across the maze where his ugly line had been.

She shakes her head and points at the finished maze insistently.

_—misshapen sure—wrong—still works—solved this—showed you—_

He smiles sadly at her then and lets her go early.

It’s not his fault.  She can read in the dejected slump of his shoulders that this isn’t his usual area of expertise.  He doesn’t know how to treat her, but he’s trying his best because he’s all the Justice League has.

He is not all **she** has.

* * *

Damian is the one to succeed in explaining it to her.

He drags a circuit board from the Cave upstairs and into the den where she’s recovering from the last attempt at communication with Barbara and Dick.

These attempts can be exhausting for all parties involved.  Dick’s an equally boneless puddle on the sofa opposite her, and Babs is digging fingertips into her temple to ward off the headaches.

She tries to ignore him at first, but he pushes the picture of the telepath in her face again and points at his contraption emphatically.

She sits up.  She studies the board and sees wires crossed where she knows they shouldn’t be crossed.  Damian should know better really.  He does.  He’s making a point.  She tries to understand.

The power-source is labeled with one of her CAT scans.  A row of lights on the right is labeled with a mouth cut from a lipstick ad.

_—red—yellow—green—_

_—stop—slow—go—_

The red one is lit.

She watches as her little brother rewires the board in a few deft movements.  The green light bulb lights up instead.  Damian points at the rumpled photograph in her hands.

She nods eagerly.

_—yes—this is what I want—I can relearn—I did it before—_

"Back," she agrees.  "Back?"

Damian shakes his head.  Her little brother digs gloves out of his back pocket and puts them on to protect his hands.  He’s strangely grave as he pours acid over the wires of his circuit board.

Dick yells.

She barely notices as she watches the rubber coating dissolve.  The wires melt, warp, distort, and discolour in accordance to their make-up.  The little green light goes out.  The yellow one flickers before doing the same.

Dick is still yelling.  Barbara too.  Damian ignores the manhandling as he is unceremoniously shoved from the room.  She meets his eyes over Barbara’s shoulder, and nods her appreciation.

Dick trills when he’s angry.  It’s strangely endearing, but she doesn’t think he notices that about himself.

_—angry bird—can’t fight it all—not responsible for everything—not for me—_

She gets a handful of his sweatshirt and tugs her big brother in, leaning just far enough out of Babs’ embrace to rest her head against his chest.  He kisses the top of her head and runs his fingers through the shortened mop of hair.  They tangle with Barbara’s in the process.

They murmur quiet, reassuring things that wash right over her.  There’s a question too.  The sentence lilts upward at the end, and it doesn’t matter what Barbara is asking.

"Cave-in," she reports hollowly because she understands the mazes at last.

Rewiring her brain won’t help if it’s the connections themselves that have been damaged.

* * *

The audio recordings have become white noise to drown out the others.

The smooth British accent has nothing to say, but it’s soothing nonetheless.  She turns it up as loud as the MP3 player will go and turns another page absently.

Jason gave her this book.  He is their resident expert on magic and willpower and denial after all.  He likes this book so she should like it too.

He gave her the recording too.  It helped her work through the hard bits before where the writing went funny to display a strong accent.  The recording doesn’t help now.

The words don’t swim the way they had when she first tried to learn.  They stay still on the page, and she can match letters … she can even match whole words.  The patterns are there, and she’s studied this page so hard that she could likely draw it from memory.

She can’t pull the meaning from the patterns.

* * *

She had gone out _—no permission—no mask—_ and found the red street sign.  She knew that these signs said STOP and she memorized the pattern of the word.  She found it in her books.  She knew that this pattern meant STOP.

Stop.  Stop.  Stop.  Stop.

One word amongst thousands, but the letters won’t shift to form new words.  It’s like her useless attempts at finger-spelling.  If she wasn’t looking for the word, she would go right by it.  When she tries to say the word, something else comes out instead.

* * *

She never told Jason that he was right … that she likes this story or at least the parts of it that she read before the crash.

She will never find out if the garden’s magic is strong enough to heal Mary and Colin.

She’ll have to find her own.

She has to try.


End file.
